I'm not unconvinced Hegseth bought wholesale into the book version of Starship Troopers, since Heinlein complaining about calling it the Department of Defense is one of his stand-in character rants. But that is my personal bias since I forced myself to suffer through it recently.
Yeah, the idea is that we wanted to move focus from might make right to deterrance and international law. It's why the UN charter prohibits agressive war but allow self defense, and why the US renamed its departement of war to department of defense in 1947.
So yeah, sure, in the current attitude and action that are very much "hey let's go back to that great time where we openly agreed war of conquest are a good thing" they have it makes sense.
Polling I saw says only about 18% of Americans are calling it that, with 72% sticking with the actual legal name (Department of Defense). Even a majority of Republicans are still calling it the Department of Defense.
The other name changes by the Trump administration are also not catching on.
70+% also continue to call the Gulf of Mexico "Gulf of Mexico".
A large majority also continue to call Mount Denali "Mount Denali".
A significant majority is still calling the Kennedy Center that instead of "The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts".
North Korea calls itself the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, but nobody else calls it that. It also claims to control the entire Korean peninsula.
Umm...when we lived in Colombia, my son decided to re-name himself Martillo Veneno. For those who don't know Spanish, that's Hammer Poison. You have something against that?
It used to be named the Department of War and Palmer Luckey suggested naming it back. People agreed, so they did. It's just another part of changing the posture to match the philosophy that the best defensive is a good offense. It seems to be working pretty well, if you know what we're defending against.
For a few years before it was the Department of Defense it was the National Military Establishment (with an initialism with a very unfortunate pronunciation given its function) and before that it didn't exist at all.
Now, before the National Military Establishment was formed to unify the nations military bureaucracy, there were two separate cabinet level departments, the Department of War (which oversaw the Army) and the Department of the Navy (which oversaw the Navy, including the Marine Corps.) When the NME was created, the Army was split into the Army and the Air Force, and the Department of War was likewise split into the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force. Both of these new Departments and the Department of the Navy remained (briefly) cabinet-level departments with their own Secretaries, while the NME was headed by the new Secretary of Defense.
Very quickly, though, further reforms were adopted in law and the NME became the Department of Defense and the service secretaries were formally subordinated to the Secretary of Defense and were now subcabinet positions (which is how the DoD got its unique, within the US executive branch, Department with its own cabinet level Secretary with subordinate Departments headed by a subcabinet level Secretaries organization.)
TLDR: The Department of War was not an earlier name for the Department of Defense, it was the name for the Department of the Army before the Air Force was split out from it.
> Palmer Luckey suggested naming it back. People agreed, so they did.
Well, again, it couldn’t be named back to “Department of War”, because its only previous name was “National Military Establishment.” And while some people obviously agreed that it should be called “Department of War”, they didn’t actually rename it. The name in law of the organization named “The Department of Defense” in 1949 by amendments to the National Security Act of 1947 remains “The Department of Defense”. It hasn’t been renamed. The present executive branch leadership has adopted nicknames for the department and the titles of its officials ("secondary titles” in the language of EO 14347 which formalized the system of nicknames [and also recounts as if true the false history that “Department of War” was previously the name of the Department of Defense].)
That's exactly what's happening, see the EU digital euro scheme. It's planned to be free of fees too, modeled around how SEPA was done for wires.
There has been massive resistance by the incumbents of course, including banks (since they too charge a fee on top of visa).
It's been in the backlog for years but the US sanction against ICC judges leading to them being cut off from most things including payment triggered a renewal of it.
That's what I am afraid of. The resistance from the incumbents plus the external pressure from the US (and China?) might be to strong. Better go with a federated approach, mandating all the different payment apps available all over the EU to allow connections from other participants.
In any case, the digital euro seems to take years (earlier expected date is 2029). I don't understand why it takes so long.
The European Payments Initiative (Wero) made the mistake of only aiming for Peer-to-Peer QR code payments, carefully avoiding competing with cards so each country could keep their card schemes (Cartes Bancaires, Girocard etc). I don't think it will ever even _compete_ with cards in the near future.
From what I remember the bank started to federate around a payment network to outcompete the digital euro. I hope the digital euro wins, I hope they don't fumble it.
When it comes to industrial manufacturing, a think of lot of people are not realizing (by lack of education on the matter in general knowledge or schooling) the difference between levels of manufacturing, the precision required for some things, and how the hard part is having the full chain (making the tool that can make the tool that can make the tool that ...) because you can't jump from nothing to milimeter precision.
Also known as "why did China who already owned world manufacturing insisted and struggled on making ballpoint pen until 2017", "why are car manufacturers not making random cheap cars that have the curbs of beloved sports cars", "why are barely 5-6 countries able to make decent jet engines" and all that.
Manufacturing is hard. It's built upon layers and layers of deep knowledge and abilities. And when don't have it or you lose it, just knowing how to make the last layer is not enough, you need to rebuild the entire stack.
Which in this case becomes "painting something black is easy, making a fan black is easy, making a high quality high precision fan black from the starting point of the same fan in another color is an industrial challenge".
We are so used to high quality high precision manufacturing, we have a bazillion factories pumping out millions of very high tech things for random usages or tools now and we stopped noticing it ... And then someone makes a small mistake and you get a "Samsung Note 7 explodes randomly" because of a margin of error small than what our brain can easily comprehend.
(I did a couple months of industrial engineering in university and while it wasn't for me, I loved what I learned about the field)
A lot of times it's cheaper to just full send it than produce a full run at a given quality with a low rejection rate.
The "old" way of making a black fan is you just QC check them, send the good ones to Noctua, send the crappy ones to someone who DGAF because they're putting them some sort of industrial appliance that needs airflow through the box.
Everyone "wins" this way because Noctua gets their fan to spec cheaper and the people building plasma cutters or control units for chemical washers or ATMs get a fan that's "fundamentally good" if sloppily executed and the manufacturer gets less waste. Ain't no different than how the pork belly that doesn't become your bacon becomes dog food and die lubricant.
I suspect this is where a lot of the "X compatible" power tool stuff on Amazon comes from. That and/or the repurposing of "worn out" dies.
Yes you provide a great example of binning and market separation. Though I think in this case there's some limiting factors that make it infeasible to bin these fancy Noctua fan rotors including: 1) tooling have limited lifetime and will get sloppier and worse yields as time goes on. It's inefficient to use precious cycles of a precise tool and die on producing lower grade parts. 2) the material itself is likely more expensive than what industrial/lower grade use cases require. Why use reject Noctua when you can get regular crappy plastic for 1/500th the cost? 3) I expect Noctua stuff to be a much lower volume than lower cost/quality vendors so the volume of Noctua rejects is likely too low for a company to dedicate a product line using it. 4) brand/marketing reasons
Another obvious use case of binning is for microchips where the same die can be "wounded" to create multiple product variants that target different market segments, and also yield improvement from being able to isolate and disable an area of the die that are defective. However improving the manufacturability and yield itself is still fundamentally important
And what is that worth, when they failed to properly protect their allies in a war they initiated against something that was obvious and expected ? The attack on Iran has been absolutely terrible for the US's image as an absolute military power
The world's rules were written by them, for them, and their allies notably european countries were willing to go along for the ride for all the side benefit of said safety and stability, both pretended it was a gift out of niceness while it was actually massively profitable
But then a portion of the US started believing the whole gift part, and now they're destroying their own control of the world order and forcing other to realign out of their control
The PAX Americana established from '45 and expanded globally after the Soviet Union fell is so all-encompassing that people can't see beyond it anymore. They just can't see the forest as they've been between the trees all their lives.
We've truly fell for our own tricks as we call it "international rulebased order" which hides the fact that it's just a benevolent dictatorship under the American Federal government.
As we say in Dutch: trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback. Perhaps now it leaves in a Boeing.
This will forever change the US' role in the world.
> But then a portion of the US started believing the whole gift part, and now they're destroying their own control of the world order and forcing other to realign out of their control
I'm still not sure whether Trump actually believes it or if he's just using it as a propaganda tool. I remember how he reported a conversation with Macron telling him that Macron will have to increase the cost of drugs for French citizens. It was so completely out of touch as drug pricing works completely different in the EU. But he definitely likes to directly imply that all positive aspects of life in Europe are being sponsored by the USA (rather than citizens paying higher taxes). Who knows, maybe he believes it, I wouldn't be surprised really.
One, I feel like the "propping up Europe" is preposterous when europe is buying those things, not getting them for free, just like american weapon delivery to Ukraine have been paid by europe and not free for a long while now.
Two, the US wasting of ammunition in an ill-prepared fight against Iran that has not produced any of the result they claim to want but managed to make things instable for a lot of the world has nothing to do with helping Europe.
Ukraine soldiers had some comments on US military guidelines for use of patriots that they saw in this war - incredibly wasteful, where up to 10-15 rockets are used per 1 incoming shahed. They just set the system in automatic mode, let it select targets and fire at its will, and run for the bunker.
Ukrainians, having very little of those (or nothing now), used 1 patriot missile per 1 boogey with little drop in effectiveness, and whole crew remained in and guided it manually. According to them system is built to be wasteful to increase those interception numbers marginally, but for anything but short exchange its a very bad design mistake that can be easily overwhelmed or depleted, as seen trivially exploitable by enemy.
Ukraine government also issued a statement saying that the US forces used 800 Patriot interceptors against Iran in three days at the start of the current war.
While Ukraine used just 600 interceptors in 4 years of war.
Every year for like the last decade I've heard "pivot to China" proceeded by the US using its various European bases to attack something in the Middle East.
But even worse in this specific case is "we do it for Europe" seems to be the thing they keep repeating, but if they had bothered to ask or warn us we all would have told them to stay the hell away from it, don't touch it, don't start it, no absolutely not.
One country even asked them publicly why didn't you warn us and Trump's only answer was some stupid comment about pearl harbor. This is so absurd.
I'm sure it happened in a meeting where the word SYNERGY was said a lot but it clearly doesn't work and it's not the first time Microsoft makes this blunder everything was .net then everything was live then everything was xbox then everything was 365 now everything is copilot and if someone tell me they use copilot 365 I still have no idea if they use web apps or desktop apps or anything because they confuse a brand with an actual product.
Thanks for the whistle stop tour of Microsoft branding! I remember when Microsoft Passport was first rebranded to be a “.net Passport”! And all the later ones.
> The real competition is going to come from companies using the $599 Neo + Google Workgroups or whatever they're calling it - now Microsoft is cut out entirely.
The companies doing that are cut in two groups. The one that don't fully plan it and they need to do with complex excel or whatever files here and there and they're still in microsoft's grasp, or those that fully do and move to disposable chromebook.
Sailors saw mermaids all the time too, I don't think they're all hiding under a rock since we invented the camera
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